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SENSATIONALISM MADE REAL: THE ROLE OF REALISM IN THE PRODUCTION OF SENSATIONAL AFFECT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2015

Janice M. Allan
Janice M. Allan*
Affiliation:
University of Salford
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Extract

Like all complicated relationships, that between realism and sensationalism has been subject to a good deal of rumour and speculation. In what might be described as the pair's first critical encounter – in an 1852 joint review of W. M. Thackeray's The History of Henry Esmond and Wilkie Collins's proto-sensation novel Basil – a critic for Bentley's Miscellany intimates that a partnership between two such different forms is anything but likely. “We have,” he explains, “put these two books ‘over against’ each other, to use one of Mr. Thackeray's favourite Queen-Anne-isms, because they have no kind of family resemblance. They are, indeed, as unlike each other as any two books can be. They constitute a kind of literary antithesis” (“Esmond” 576). The inherently contradictory nature of this originary “over against” gesture – conflating proximity and distance, contiguity and difference – sets the keynote for subsequent discussions, contemporaneous and current, of a generic relationship that continues to attract and elude definition.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 97 - 112
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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